February 21, 2010:

What a weekend of fishing this has been. It just kept getting better as did the weather. We were blessed with mid 50 degree weather today & the fish seemed just fired up. We got on the river earlier today than yesterday which allowed us our choice of spots. We picked a spot down river that we don’t fish as regularly as we do some others. But it produced.

Kevin and I split up at the truck I headed of down river with a dry dropper rig and Kevin moved upstream of the nymph rig. As I fished my way downstream through a long run it just wasn’t happening for me on the dry. So I swapped to a Dry Dropper/Dropper rig a little deeper and began catching fish at the bottom of the run.  I was fishing a scud pattern and a blue wing nymph under my dry. I hooked into 10 fish downstream before swapping out to a deep nymph rig. I was fishing in a larger tailout at the bottom of a run, it got to be fairly deep in there and with slow moving current there was some subtle takes. As soon as I went deep on my nymph rigs. The fish really seemed to be liking the blue wing nymph so I knew the hatch would be on soon.

Meanwhile upstream I can hear Kevin about every minute on the radio. Fish On!… Dink…..Fish On!…Nice Rainbow ….. Fish on…. Nice Brown…. Fish on…. another nice rainbow. It went on at about that pace for every bit of 2 hours.

I started seeing some rises with blue wings on the water as the hatch was moving up river.  Fish were rising with regularity so I switch out to a dry/dry rig. I’ll often fish 2 dry’s of different sizes to help me match the hatch a little quicker today it was a 22 bwo they wanted … the wouldn’t look at a 18 so I stuck with the smaller.

(Meanwhile upstream: Kevin is landing a nice 18 inch brown you’ll see on the video. What a pig.)

I caught 5 fish in a row on the dry one right after another … healthy 10 inch rainbows and browns. Release the fish.. Fanny the Dry….Cast… Set…Fight… Repeat. So I’m doing pretty well until a fella starts casting a spinner in my hip pocket. So back upstream I go. I set my camera down on a rock and take some video, the dry fly’s are continually moving up river. There has to be a fish rising here. I’m watching the far bank where I have seen and caught fish rising before.  And sure enough like they were cued to do so a couple of nice rainbows start rising about 40 feet out across 2 current seams. I make half a dozen drifts through there and hook up on one of the rainbows feeding.  (Meanwhile: Kevin has railed good fish all morning) so he’s ready for lunch feeling confident he sore lipped every fish in the river. We head to “THE STORE” for a good homemade burger and some tots,  before setting up for an afternoon shoot.  With an hour and a half left to fish when we got back down river, I decided to take one for the team to get some good video footage. We we’re able to pick up quite a few good fish through the afternoon further up river. All in all a very good day on the river. This river will spoil you one day and teach you something the very next. That’s what keeps us coming back each and every time.